This tutorial will take you from zero to running your first buildbot master and worker as quickly as possible, without changing the default configuration.

This tutorial is all about instant gratification and the five minute experience: in five minutes we want to convince you that this project works, and that you should seriously consider spending time learning the system.
In this tutorial no configuration or code changes are done.

This tutorial assumes that you are running Unix, but might be adaptable to Windows.

There are many ways to get the code on your machine.
We will use the easiest one: via pip in a virtualenv.
It has the advantage of not polluting your operating system, as everything will be contained in the virtualenv.

You will also need a working Internet connection, as virtualenv and pip will need to download other projects from the Internet. The master and builder daemons will need to be able to connect to github.com via HTTPS to fetch the repo we’re testing; if you need to use a proxy for this ensure that either the HTTPS_PROXY or ALL_PROXY environment variable is set to your proxy, e.g., by executing exportHTTPS_PROXY=http://localhost:9080 in the shell before starting each daemon.

Note

Buildbot does not require root access.
Run the commands in this tutorial as a normal, unprivileged user.

The worker will be executing the commands sent by the master.
In this tutorial, we are using the buildbot/hello-world project as an example.
As a consequence of this, your worker will need access to the git command in order to checkout some code.
Be sure that it is installed, or the builds will fail.

Same as we did for our master, we will create a virtualenv for our worker next to the other one.
It would however be completely ok to do this on another computer - as long as the worker computer is able to connect to the master one: